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Shivanku is an analytics enthusiast with a mix of consulting and hands-on experience within decision sciences, spanning across multiple domains including CPG, Financial Services, Technology, Retail, E-commerce & Gaming. He currently leads the data science and analytics function within BI for the US business of Heineken. Holding several gold medals for his undergraduate degree in Science, Shivanku is an MBA in Marketing and Strategy. When he is not crunching numbers - Shivanku likes to mentor entry level data scientists and analysts, on the LinkedIn group that he has named as 'Career in Analytics'.

How will the way data is used change in the next 5 years?

Data is exploding, and the next 5 years will witness what one may call the renaissance of data science. New sources of data will generate enormous amount of content, and unfortunately (or fortunately) there will be as much signal as noise in this data. With 'Internet of Things' and 'Artificial Intelligence', it will become a challenge for data scientists to isolate the 'Right Signal' at the 'Right Time' (vs. today, where we still consider isolation of noise from the signal a challenge).

What impact will new legislation, like the GDPR, have on the way companies use data moving forward?

New legislation like GDPR will hurt the commercials of data collection, as the customers would need to be incentivized to share their information with the companies. That said, there might be innovative ways of extracting key customer information and leveraging machine learning principles to extrapolate this data to a broader population without compromising customer's privacy.

What are the biggest challenges that the data community faces?

Perpetual challenge that data scientists still face is to identify the 'Right Analytics' approach at the 'Right Time', as the ultimate goal is growing business performance. Many analytics professionals fall in the trap of 'advanced' algorithms, while what's more important is 'making the Right Decision' at the right time.

Public perception of data collection is generally negative, how can we change this in the future?

The public needs to be incentivized and motivated by sharing as to why is it important for them to allow companies to access their data. A great example can be companies that do research on twins at the Twins Day event in Ohio (
http://www.twinsdays.org ). Here the participants happily travel from all over the US, and then allow the research organizations to collect their data.

Are there any technological shortcomings currently holding data back? If so, how can they be overcome?

Real time processing and harmonization of data from multiple sources will be challenging. One way to alleviate this would be to introduce structured data governance processes, enabled by collaborative platforms.